Politics Has Always Had a Place in Football

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN,

“Wouldn’t you love to see one of these N.F.L. owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now, out, he’s fired.’” With those disparaging words, spoken Friday night at a campaign speech for a Senate candidate in Alabama, the president of the United States ignited a firestorm, which he continued to stoke on Twitter over the weekend.

“If a player wants the privilege of making millions of dollars in the NFL, or other leagues,” he wrote on Saturday, “he or she should not be allowed to disrespect our Great American Flag (or Country) and should stand for the National Anthem. If not, YOU’RE FIRED. Find something else to do!”

It’s no surprise that a man who seemed to have thought Frederick Douglass was still alive also appears to believe that football was a blessedly apolitical zone until the likes of Colin Kaepernick and Michael Bennett, two prominent athletes who have taken a knee during the national anthem to protest racism, appeared on the gridiron. But Trump couldn’t be more off base.

In the pros, and even more at the college level, football was not incidental to the doctrine of segregation and the ideology of white supremacy. It was one of the pillars on which they rested. At the football powerhouses in the American South, the sport resisted integration nearly a decade longer than lunch counters, bus systems, hotels and other strongholds of Jim Crow.

Under federal pressure in 1963, for example, the University of Alabama admitted its first two black students. Seven more years passed, however, before the Crimson Tide’s legendary football coach, Paul Bryant, known as Bear, signed his first African-American recruit, Wilbur Jackson. And Bryant did so while he was being sued by civil rights attorneys for his failure to desegregate the team.

To put it another way, football was too important to desegregate. In the years before many pro franchises in football or any other sport opened in the Sun Belt, college football was the Saturday sacrament, a regional religion second only to evangelical Christianity.

The tawdry record of Southern universities should give no moral superiority to pro football or football outside Dixie. The last N.F.L. team to have an African-American player was, pointedly, the Washington Redskins. As Thomas J. Smith points out in his book “Showdown,” it took direct pressure from the Kennedy administration to get Washington to sign Bobby Mitchell, a halfback and future Hall of Fame inductee, in 1962.

The battle for equal rights in pro football continued with the efforts of black quarterbacks to break the color line at that position. The resistance to a black quarterback, which ran through every single pro team, was built upon the dogma of white supremacy. No black player was considered smart enough or leader enough to be the “field general.”

The Colin Kaepernick affair of its time, in fact, was the controversy in Los Angeles when the Rams’ owners overruled their own head coach and brought in four white quarterbacks to try to replace Harris. Finally, the Rams shipped him to the San Diego Chargers, where he spent what should have been the prime years of his career as a backup.

Ultimately, the efforts of pioneers like Harris led to the emergence of black quarterbacks, head coaches and general managers in the N.F.L. To this day, the league remains far ahead of major colleges in diversity at the top ranks. Despite such gains, as has been widely reported, seven N.F.L. owners donated $1 million or more to President Trump’s campaign or inaugural coffers.

But if the president thought he had leverage over those owners, he guessed wrong. Even Robert Kraft of the New England Patriots — who not only donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign but gave him a Super Bowl ring — issued a statement before Sunday’s kickoffs affirming players’ rights to “peacefully affect social change.” Another prominent Trump supporter, the former Jets coach Rex Ryan, said of Mr. Trump’s statements: “I’m reading these comments and it’s appalling to me and I’m sure it’s appalling to almost any citizen in our country. It should be.”

If Trump sought to divide players from owners and from one another, he appears to have done just the opposite. Whatever he might hear from his base in a supremely red state, Americans aren’t nostalgic for the benighted days when Jim Crow ruled the gridiron. I have long admired the strength, guile and intelligence of N.F.L. players, and on Sunday they gave me renewed cause to honor their social conscience.

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